Readers have been tweeting at us for years now to ask when we’d have an app. We’ve long wanted one too, and we suddenly got the manpower to be able to build a good one when we acquired Sachin’s company Cocoon (W19) last year.
Soon after starting Substack, we found it easiest to explain what we do as “We make it simple to start a paid newsletter.” Even then, a Substack was more than just an email newsletter: it was also a blog, and it could host embedded video and audio, and people could leave comments and participate in discussion threads. But the term “newsletter” was useful shorthand because everyone kind of got what that meant. All along, though, we’ve been quietly building the tools for what we call “personal media empires,” encompassing different media formats (natively) and community discussion (which we intend to make better and better).
By a similar token, right from the start we’ve been intending for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools. We’re excited by the vision of Substack becoming a network, where writers and readers benefit from being part of a larger ecosystem. For writers, it means they can be discovered by readers who might not otherwise have found them. For readers, it means being able to connect directly with writers and other readers and to explore a universe of great work.
The app is a key part of the network vision. Nothing changes in terms of writers and readers being in control. The writers still own their mailing lists, content, and IP and can take it all with them anytime they want. Anyone who signs up to a Substack through the app still goes on to that mailing list. And readers still get to choose what appears in their “inbox,” with the power to subscribe and unsubscribe from whatever they want (you can also add any RSS feed into the app via reader.substack.com). But now we’ll have more and better ways to surface recommendations from writers and readers, to show people’s profiles, and to deliver notifications inside and outside of the app.
This is just a start for the Substack app. We want to keep improving it, so please give us feedback and ask us the hard questions. What do you think we’re doing wrong? What could be better? What could be great? What might we not have thought of?
We’re here for the next couple hours. Ask us anything.
To all the HN regulars here - own your medium instead. Own your content. There's no need to stick to yet another VC funded "writing experience". Many potential readers will eventually hit a subscription fatigue. There are several proven strategies to monetise your content (and Substack isn't one of them).
Data export, mailing lists, billing information all belong to a third party who charges you commission to "facilitate". I am sure that commission will increase down the line, and the net effect will be less and less.
Think before you leap into this.
I've got an email newsletter that 874 people pay me $5/m to read (The Sizzle - https://thesizzle.com.au). I set it up outside of Substack a few years ago, then migrated when Substack launched with the hope their platform would bring in new readers and make my life easier.
This turned out to be a massive waste of over a year, as not only did the newsletter stop growing, it lost subscribers. There was no platform effect by being on Substack, so I left it, setup my homebrew solution (where all the bits, like billing, email sending, customer info are interchangeable) and growth has resumed and I'm doing better than ever - all without giving Substack a 10% cut and further locking myself into their ecosystem.
Here's a blog post explaining in more detail why I chose to remove myself from Substack if anyone is interested: https://blog.decryption.net.au/t/why-i-use-a-mishmash-of-ser...
Your model sounds better for professional writers, or already established writers. But the benefit of Substack for emerging writers is that it gives them a platform to establish a brand presence with the hope that it will develop into a large enough audience to get enthusiastic readers who will convert into paid subscribers. There is also no easy way for new writers to try to start a writing career while also trying to figure out different technologies to send out a newsletter. Substack makes it completely easy, and it's fair that they charge some percentage once a writer starts earning money while using their platform.
The good thing about substack compared to most centralized apps is that writers maintain control over their audience address list. This aligns incentives since leaving is possible. It makes them more of an actual software platform for their writers which is a good thing imo. As long as this remains true, the risk is low.
It’s probably the best outcome you can realistically get on the non-urbit web outside of niche providers like ghost which have their own trade-offs.
I suspect the hardest thing for substack will be the moderation position they find themselves in. If they do anything to try to help increase readership (even if they don't) they will eventually find themselves in the same difficult situations as every other platform, this is just an unavoidable fact of being a centralized service with this power and capability (and choosing who you will not allow as customers is a form of substack's speech). Having this responsibility is not easy and with continued success and scale becomes messy.
This (imo) just isn't something that can be solved by a centralized system effectively, even though it sounds like they'll do the best the can: https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati...
It seems like this would be a cost-benefit analysis for each writer. For technical writers who can spin up their own blog and add Stripe subscription billing, it might not make sense. But for writers who are technically not savvy, or who write things that could benefit from journalistic legal protections, it might make more sense. I don't get the sense that the amount they charge is so high that it wouldn't be a reasonable option for anyone.
hosting platform, promotion, backend, frontend, spam control, whitelisted mail server with high inbox rate
not a bad deal for having to pay 10%
Surely Substack is no less proven than any other content monetization strategy for individual authors. Most people simply can't make a living from writing, regardless of their monetization strategy. And at a minimum, Substack at least has proof points [1] that their platform has been working for someone.
Also, "pyramid scheme" has specific meaning and is not matching Substack at all.
if you want to "own your content" self host, do not use any of these platforms.
What is the question you're asking here?
I downvoted you for being rude.
1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. That doesn't feel particularly hard to put together, though maybe I totally underestimate that. So what's powering Substack's growth is that you were able to get guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander etc on board. How much of your growth do you think is product vs business/dealmaking?
2. You've been strong defenders of free speech, especially in the last two years where there's been a ton of censorship. Really, it's helped a lot, I've felt like Substack was one of the few places I could find rational and logical takes on things like lockdowns at a time when everyone else was losing their minds. Do you have some sort of strong philosophical take on this, or is it a sort of default because censorship takes specific effort and you're busy with growth?
3. Related to that, the pattern of tech firms being open access and supporters of free speech for some years and then later losing that as they hire more and more people (especially, new grads) seems to be a recurring one. Given you're based in San Francisco, do you have a plan to actually keep Substack the way it is, in the face of hiring employees who might demand you constantly cancel the witch-du-jour?
4. There's IMO a ton of potential for innovation with group discussions. To me, Slashdot was actually the peak of innovation in large scale anonymous forum discussions with many clever features, crowdsourced moderation, friends/foes, meta-mods etc. Do you plan to try new things with discussions, or stick to a conventional approach? Right now it's pretty basic.
I think what has driven our growth is a nice synthesis between the product, the business dev work (i.e. convincing writers to give it a shot), and the business model.
The model may be the underestimated part. It's compelling for many writers, partly because of its simplicity and transparency: you own the relationship with your audience, you publish stuff that gets sent to them, and then if you're doing good work some portion of that audience will choose to pay you to keep going. That's a good deal for writers, since:
a) It lets them do the work they believe is most important b) No one can mess with their audience c) There's a clear path to making money, which is the major thing absent from most other options for writing on the internet (or, increasingly, anywhere else).
These things make Substack a relatively easy "sell".
Of course, some writers are better poised to succeed with this model than others, so we have put in a sustained effort to identify those writers and let them know about their opportunity on Substack. In a small number of cases, that has meant we've offered a financial package to derisk the move for them (you can think of it as like startup funding to get them going; many don't have much financial buffer and may be reluctant to leave jobs even if they are unhappy in those jobs). But the vast majority of writers doing well on Substack have come to the platform of their own accord, without any kind of deal.
That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.
4. YES!
I'm interested in hearing more, I recently had a Substack recruiter reach out to me and was curious about this because I work at a tech company w/ some internal "activists" (I don't consider them to be activists).
How would you talk about it with them while hiring? It seems like you might need to bring up uncomfortable (and potentially risky) things like politics (?) during an interview?
What to do if your employees start doing walkouts or what not? At the company I work for this happened. A lot of people don't feel comfortable standing up to the ones who are most vocal about cancel-culture (if you disagree with them you may be labeled and considered a "fascist" (ugh) or even worse a "nazi" and your career impacted), I find that most people just stay silent in the face of this and the organizers of these movements seem to rule the roost in the workplace.
Great job either way I'm a Substack supporter! :thumbsup:
So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support?
From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?
> Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions.
I think I'm going to start subscribing to two writers in particular and see how that goes. This is a great model.
So do you ever worry that you might end up like Parler? What happens if AWS, Cloudflare, payment processors etc. decide to kick you off the internet because of whom you publish? Right now it seems unlikely that they'd become that intolerant, but a lot of unlikely things have happened in tech in the last few years.
Are you worried about this eventuality, and are you preparing for it?
I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope argument?
Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.
And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that typically bundles many different voices) also attracts readers that are ideological/obsessive.
That's a feedback loop that could end not well.
Probably very well, for the same reason that Joe Rogan's podcast is the most listened to podcast in the US: those views are widely accepted by about 50% of the population.
Despite your pejorative labelling you aren't actually finding extreme minority viewpoints on substack, you're finding modern-day mainstream conservative perspectives.
The readership potential is huge.
(And how is porn not speech? If you ban porn then you're not defending free speech in any meaningful manner.)
It's fascinating that the top-level comment telling us how they "love" Substack is from someone who apparently thinks the fight against Covid is equivalent to modern-day Stalinism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30637571 further in this thread).
Whoops.
Email is actually pretty great for this, and email is especially powerful for giving writers direct connection to their readers. But there are limits to what you can do there, and stuff like community discussion, audio and video, and even 'not accidentally going to the promotions tab' can get a big upgrade.
Somewhat related: developing for email is still a pretty big pain. It's kinda like the bad old days when you had to support IE6 - lots of people still use old versions of outlook or whatever.
I hear you, it's a shit show! I'm gonna have to do that myself soon and I don't look forward to it.
> But there are limits to what you can do [in email]
But email will still be a very common entry point for readers (unless you expect to change the behavior of your users), so you still need to link to the app or website from the email.
As a user I don't mind an app from a technical perspective. It gives me more options! But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot?
I can imagine Substack is more of an "aspires to read X" platform than a place for actually reading X. This argument is anecdotally supported by the sensationalism of popular pieces I see go viral, the payment system (it is always easier to quickly monetize aspiration than behavior), and its reliance on growth through virtue-signaling (eg twitter).
Being able to open the app to read when I want to will be much nicer.
While I agree with the overall message of web over app (and have bugged some of my colleagues for going "App First", locking themselves into particular ecosystems before gaining audience), for consuming content, there are benefits to Apps, when done properly .
Most pertinently, offline content - I will always use Prime/Netflix/Disney in app form rather than Web form.
Offering an app as an option is a brilliant way to meet everybody's needs.
(nagging/pushing an app and deprecating web, however, is devil's work:)
One of the main products at my job is a new site that we've spent a lot of time making performant and readable but we're still building an app experience because we want to meet our users (particularly affluent users) where they are.
I have yet to hear a user data analytics team say that.
I'm a paid subscriber to a number of Substack writers, and I'd like to subscribe to more, but it can rapidly run into the hundreds of dollars per month - so I really have to pick and choose.
I can imagine bundles aren't really your model, and maybe aren't in your authors interest either. But I'd love to get like an Economics bundle and a New Zealand journalism bundle (shout-out to Bernard Hickey here, doing great work with his The Kaka Substack).
Or even a pay-per-article model - some of the free newsletters I'm on publish paywalled things I'm interested in, but I don't want to subscribe to the full deal. But I'd pre-load my account with $50 and pay a couple of dollars for a single article.
In a similar vein, LWN used to have a thing where people could pay to make the article free. There are sometimes paywalled articles I'd love to share around, but I don't want to deprive the author of revenue. If I could pay for a link that can be shared X number of times, or could chip-in to a "if enough people pay this article becomes free" fund, I would.
The bundle question is interesting.
The model right now is really an unbundling. The direct relationship between writers and readers is what makes Substack work: as a writer, your incentive is to earn and keep the trust of the audience who deeply values your work. That's not just a good way to get paid for work you're already doing. It's a model that allows and rewards a fundamentally different and better kind of work that the work you would have to do if you were e.g. trying to please something like the Spotify algorithm.
That said, bundle economics are real. And so while we wouldn't and couldn't do some top down bundle, if there were a way to do bundling that maintained the direct connection, and put writers and readers in charge (e.g. writer self federation, or readers buying several subscriptions at once) that could be very interesting in the future.
This will offer some genuine benefits to readers (one monthly payment, maybe a discount) and to writers (lower transaction fees, since Stripe has a fixed cost that eats into small payments), but it will also sever the thing that currently makes it possible for authors to leave Substack and take 100% of their paid subscribers with them: every single reader has a unique subscription object in each individual publisher's Stripe account, which can then be ported to any other platform using Stripe. So when writers leave Substack they won't be able to take with them any subscribers who arrived through a bundle.
I think writers won't realise the danger here, and that Substack will therefore be able to lock in writers, against their original promise.
I would be delighted if this didn't happen, and happy to retract this if Chris could just promise that Substack will never do this kind of bundling, even if it's opt-in for publishers.
Also an emergence of a "curator" class, people who could assemble "newspapers" out of the newsletters could be interesting, too.
Also The Pragmatic Engineer: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/
This is an excellent idea! Tracking individual articles for payment, rather than the whole publication/newsletter, would allow for bundling in a way that respects Substack's intentions of preserving/respecting the author and reader relationship.
People say they want this, but in reality almost no article seems to be worthy of eg. $5, even though you would be absolutely ok subscribing for $5 to a newsletter with 2 posts per month, one of which you won't read ...
I find myself very reluctant to sign up for new newsletters on Substack now because my identity is shared across all newsletters, so I feel I can no longer keep my interests separated. To be clear: after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy. I am not certain because I do not publish myself, but I worry that writers might have an insight into other newsletters I have subscribed to as well. I would really like to have an anonymous reading (if not commenting) mode, without having to manually open an in-private tab and only be able to view the public posts of whoever's newsletter I am trying to read.
The issue I have with Substack in particular is that it was essentially founded around political newsletters. I'm not sure, but I think Bill Bishop might've been their very first newsletter... and he writes about Chinese politics. Of all topics, that is one where people might have good reason to want to be able to preserve their anonymity. Of course, you could get around this by signing up for different newsletters with different email addresses, but that makes it unnecessarily difficult to read paid subscriber-only posts. I feel like the company took a wrong turn in adding social network features instead of keeping the focus on individual writers and their individual audiences.
Also consider somebody who wants to engage honestly and openly with mental health related content without risking that being dragged in to conversations elsewhere via somebody reading a unified profile.
We tried to build reader profiles in a way that can handle this nicely - you can choose on a per-subscription basis which publications to display on your profile and which you'd like to keep hidden. This is almost like an anonymous subscription although it doesn't quite support a fully anonymous commenting use case, since theoretically someone could recognize you from different comment sections.
One thing I could see us trying in the future is giving writers more control over who can comment and how, on their particular publications. Already, writers can choose whether to allow comments from all subscribers, only paid subscribers, or to turn off comments entirely. Allowing writers to choose to support anonymous commenting doesn't seem out of the question.
I do think giving writers the choice to enable anonymous commenting would help to improve things, although it's a little bit closing the barn door after the horse bolted, since we can't go back and anonymize comments that we already made. If allowing different pseudonyms (including avatar) for different newsletters isn't on the cards, I think the idea mentioned elsewhere of allowing the app to compile multiple logins into a single client-side feed could make the existing workaround of creating multiple accounts a bit less painful.
Either way, despite my frustrations with the identity behavior, I do appreciate the platform you have built, and how it seems to have revitalized the blogosphere. I also very much like the focus on email, since it allows me to read whenever I want instead of just when my device is online. So thanks for helping shift the culture of online writing in this way.
For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?
Peruse the leaderboards at substack.com and in the new app (in the Discover tab).
Check out the profiles of the writers and readers you most respect (just click on their faces). You'll find lists of Substacks they're subscribed to, which may lead you to some interesting places and new writers to respect.
Yesterday he wrote an article about being “anti-woke” on a college campus. It included recommendations such as what he called the “berserker strategy” which was to pick as many fights as possible on every social justice topic.
Scott is anything but unbiased. He writes with flowery language that elicits a sense of faux humbleness and “both sides” journalism while subtlety pushing the reader to his desired conclusions on things like race and IQ.
He’s famous for leaked e-mails where he admitted writing a lot about neoreactionaries because it gets more clicks, which has made him somewhat of a hero among those circles. He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ.
He may feel unbiased and objective due to his writing style, but he’s far from it if you’ve been following him and reading closely.
I don't agree with 100% of what he writes but it is always stimulating and challenging. Very strongly recommended.
Bari Weiss’ Common Sense, Scott Alexander (the comments here trashing him are wrong, easy to tell by reading him), The Diff by Byrne Hobart is one of the best finance blogs online, Noahpinion by Noah Smith, Zvi Mowshowitz has had good writing about Covid.
Andrew Sullivan’s the weekly dish has different politics than I do, but he’s also a good writer with a scout mindset imo.
Outside of substack, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Sam Harris, Ben Thompson of Stratechery, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Julia Galef are all great.
Sam Harris in particular is a really good, smart, interviewer.
Dr. Robert Malone is not a journalist but a scientist. The analysis of recent medical studies shunned by the mainstream media is worth the time investment.
I’m trying to get away from folks that make broad, sweeping judgements without much data / firsthand knowledge or dangle open ended conspiracy theory questions about subjects they have little to no expertise in.
Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, etc are super interesting but in our experience can hold an app back long term. As you're able to dedicate more resources to the product, it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs. It's a tough decision to make for early stage start-ups but we also went with native at Cocoon (our last startup which was acquired by Substack). I think some important factors that should go into the decision are 1) how important you think both Android and iOS support are out of the gate 2) how soon you'd expect to be able to hire native engineers for both platforms 3) your long term vision for the product and its desired complexity. We love Android (I've got some Kotlin experience myself) and will have it out ASAP, but with the existing email/web product there is less pressure for cross platform in our case.
We all use Android while our users are mostly in single platform approach won't work for us. We're also a hardware company, so need BLE and WebBle support isn't good enough for us.
Thanks for your answer
> it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs.
Besides the custom UI stuff, as I think React Native has some decent animation support nowadays, what specific native APIs were needed in Substack's case that made React Native an ineligible choice?
As text being the main content for Substack, Its hard for me to imagine why React Native wouldn't be sufficient for a relatively simple app.
Discord, undoubtedly, has more complex UI needs compared to Substack, however it's humming along just fine with React Native.
What makes React Native capable for Discord, but incapable for your needs?
But for now I can tell a war story that might be fun. I'm one of the founders, and am in a very much non-technical role now as CEO, I did write a bunch of the very early code (some of which people curse my name for to this day.)
When we were starting, I was limited by how many new languages/frameworks I could learn at once. I started writing the backend in python, because I knew it a bit. But our first writer often needed to use Chinese characters, and in python 2.X I could never get unicode strings to work properly. I couldn't upgrade to python 3, because on google cloud I would have had to learn Docker and I was already learning too many things at once.
Eventually I got so frustrated I threw out several days work and started the whole backend over, with node + Postgres hosted in Heroku. This ended up defining much of the stack we use to this day, which might be good or bad depending who you ask. At least unicode works though :)
We are sprinting as fast as we can to get an Android app out the door. We're also planning on investing more in the reader experience on web. Some time ago, we launched a web reader (reader.substack.com) in beta and have some exciting ideas in the works to evolve that surface.
Beyond Android, when it smaller platforms like iPad / Desktop apps, it's mostly a matter of looking at the data and listening to users. With a small team, we have to be judicious with prioritization, and as we increase the surface area for readers it's important that the experience for writers remains clear (right now their readers can already read on email, web, and mobile).
It seems like creators could use the support of something like Substack without being tied to the publishing platform itself. That seems like a real opportunity.
I really don’t like the idea of newsletter platforms expanding beyond email, because the reasons why we’re using email in the first place is because it’s platform-agnostic. So your company launching an app really gives me pause. But creators I’ve talked to over the past day or so are in more of a wait-and-see mode.
I realize I’m not the target audience for your service as-is. I prefer self-hosting things like my website, I want to code my template myself, and don’t want to charge my readers a subscription fee. But I think some of the services you offer do not need the publishing platform you’ve created for it.
It could be a way to help the newsletter ecosystem without making it dependent on the URL and how we choose to publish.
Also I can't comment on a post about substack without mentioning my favorite substack post of all time![2]
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-john-onolan-grew-...
[2] https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...
Ghost is a good platform. I don’t use it these days, but I’m a bit of a maverick—case in point, I used Ghost to build my newsletter before it had any newsletter functionality! (I currently use Craft CMS, which has a dedicated view that can spit out a completed newsletter template, with custom ads, in a matter of seconds.)
As someone who does want to self host, which Substack services would be valuable to you? What do you feel like we could offer you?
You could have done the same thing and built a generalized newsletter app.
But instead you built a reader just for Substack, which is clearly built to lock in an open ecosystem, just as medium tried with blogging and Spotify is trying with podcasts.
I think promotional options within the ecosystem would be nice for newsletter creators outside of Substack, but at the same time, I think the work that you’ve put into building significant resources is a unique offering in the sector that nobody else is doing to the same degree.
A good model to compare this to, in my mind, would be the Freelancers Union (https://www.freelancersunion.org), which offers a lot of services to people who freelance. That I think could be of interest even to people who don’t publish with you.
I’ve been around the block for a bit, and I think a big part of the reason the blogging ecosystem died is because there weren’t any nets. You have done a good job of creating a net for your audience. There’s no reason that net has to be for Substack users alone.
I'm a huge fan of your platform, and love that its empowered some of my favorite journalists and other others to write freely while continuing to be able to provide for themselves.
One question I have is as a small time blogger, I currently use Medium as my platform. The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in, so I'm easily(-ish) able to attract new readers to my blog and grow the list of people who follow what I write.
What does Substack have or is planning to have product feature-wise that might allow for smaller writers to get the word out and have a social network-like following to help grow their own readership?
I would love to switch to support your product, this is the one thing holding me back.
The nice thing about "network-first" products like Medium and Twitter is that there's a large audience baked in (as you mention) that you can tap into is a small time writer. But the trade-off is that you don't own your audience - you can build up followers, but you don't have a direct connection to them outside of that product. You typically don't get their email addresses, and you can't take your audience with you if you choose to leave.
You also don't necessarily own your work! I was a huge fan of Medium when it launched, and an early active writer. One day, my best performing post got added to someone else's collection, and now it "lives" in some random space that I have nothing to do with (https://medium.com/p/3eadcdc56ff2). This was a pretty frustrating experience.
We think there's a way to have your cake and eat it too: own your own audience, and be in full control. But also get access to a network of readers that grows over time. We're trying to take a deliberate and thoughtful approach to growing the destination for readers, and the app is a major step.
Does it? Do people browse medium looking for things to read? Where does the 'baked in' audience come from?
My personal opinion of medium is very different - I usually see it as blogspam.
We have some other exciting ideas in the works for helping readers discover more writers through the lens of the writers they already trust, that the app will provide a nice canvas for.
My favorite part of Substack was how it built on top of email, an (actual) distributed protocol. I'm able to access my Substack writers alongside other writers/publication, since everybody integrates into email.
I like the reader experience of the new app and the recommendations, but I'm worried it will become another walled garden like Medium. How do you plan on protecting against that?
FWIW, Matter (https://hq.getmatter.app/) has a workaround (albiet complicated) for getting all emails forwarded to app, is that on the roadmap?
Our goal with the app is to give a seamless upgrade to the email experience -- which is why the home page works just like an inbox -- while having writers retain ownership of their list (which therefore gives them exit rights.)
We don't want to be a walled garden. We want to make a great reading experience, with porous boundaries. If you publish on Substack, it goes everywhere - email, the web, other networks, but as the writer you can pull your most valuable audience to the place that you own and can get paid from. If you read on Substack, you can read things on Substack, and then maybe things from other places, like RSS etc. I like the idea of having emails that you can get stuff delivered to.
This is exciting to hear. When I saw the announcement, but my first thought was "They're making an RSS reader that only reads from Substack". If you're actually building a _better reader_ that's bigger than Substack (and doesn't push Substack content too hard) then you've got my support!
> We don't want to be a walled garden.
Is it just me, or do those not align completely?
A paid newsletter, as in you get access if you pay, is by definition a walled garden.
I understand that because Substack and its writers both benefit from publicly available material, since it draws organic traffic. But it seems that that's not at odds with also wanting a walled garden. The difference may be the size and shape of the garden fence door. Medium is annoying by tricking you into clicking stuff that you can't read unless you sign up. Building an app seems like it could lead there. Not because you want to, but because of thinking centralised rather than decentralised.
My favourite newsletter, Haskell Weekly, distributes an article list with a summary by email, but the links go to anywhere on the web, usually personal blogs. Maybe some people like to have an app as it then functions as a browser dedicated to particular reading purpose(s). I'd personally prefer browser links. That's where I read everything and sync tabs/bookmarks between phone and computer. I hope you don't get those annoying pop-ups that keep encouraging people to install the app even though they clicked no thanks. Like Reddit. Just because the fence is mostly see-through, it still counts like a wall. :-D
However, it's true that the /show page is mostly side projects, new companies, and so on. I don't think we need to push the point, so I took Show HN out of the title now.
However, it appears you have to create an account to interact with the app at all, which is not in the spirit of Show HN.
If a new startup posted a Show HN that required giving a live email address, they would be criticized for it (and most people probably wouldn’t go any further).
EDIT: it would be great if one of the founders could create a dummy account that we could log in with. That's something other founders have done in the past, and it would be more in the spirit of Show HNs:"Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.
I think the Substack model gives us a bunch of advantages here: readers are choosing to subscribe to writers they trust, and who they then have a direct relationship with. I don't think that Apple is likely to try to police that too heavily, and if they do there is always web and email that exists as a fallback.
I.e. I think Substack's content is less likely to violate any rules (though I can only speak with so much confidence, having not read every article on Substack).
We don’t allow content that promotes harmful or illegal activities, including material that advocates, threatens, or shows you causing harm to yourself, other people, or animals.
...
Nudity, porn, erotica
We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack. We do allow depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature. However, we may hide this content from Substack’s discovery features, including search and on Substack.com.
Plenty of censorship in those paragraphs to any free speech absolutist who strives for ideological consistency. They're "cancelling" enormous amounts of what many consider free expression.
Have you ever considered offering subscription packages? I find it hard to justify making multiple paid subscriptions (they add up fast), but would love to be able to build a package of newsletters that I could subscribe to at a bundled rate of some sort. Something like a cable tv plan for Substack newsletters?
Bundles of some kind are an often-requested feature by both writers and readers. Something we're really mindful of: the direct connection between reader and writer is the magic that makes the whole Substack model work. So we would be very wary of a bundle product that abstracted that connection. However, I do think there are ways to do a bundle that keep that direct connection front and center, keeping the reader in control, and maintaining the writer's ownership of their audience. It's an interesting problem to think about!
1. When folks opt in, you can reach them whenever you want, unmediated by an algorithm 2. They can pay to subscribe, and you keep 90% of the economics and 3. You own your email list. You can leave Substack and take them with you.
These things create the incentive structure that allows great work to get done on Substack. But doing the secret email thing breaks #3. Part of the bargain as a reader on Substack is that you're giving your email.
Definitely hear you on the confirmation link thing.
Adding that to the phone app would only be exposing it on the phone app - not hiding it from functionality for anyone who wanted to do it.
Congratulations on all of your successes!
One of the good things Substack can do is put competitive pressure on traditional outlets. If people want to go independent, having a good way to do so helps them. But also that possibility creates pressure on existing institutions to give writers more freedom, pay them better, etc. etc. I don't think it's a coincidence that you see more legacy publishers starting "newsletter" divisions that give writers more leeway. All of this is good for writers in our minds and we're happy for it.
Do you think that in a few years, people will look at the the early days, in which you were thought of as a newsletter-based company, as analogous to Netflix's early days, where they were thought of as a DVD-by-mail company? I notice that like Netflix, you didn't pick a name that is tied to your first incarnation.
Also, you wouldn't believe how much time goes into customer support password issues.
I love substack, and have been writing a weekly blog on it for over a year now!
Do you have any plans to give more granular data on traffic/emails? Stuff like being able to see specific posts views over time, etc... What's currently available is ok, but I'd really like to be able to get as much data as possible and then export it into a BI tool.
Also, for a "quick win", have you considered adding the ability for authors to generate unique URLs for sharing posts? Ideally with separated analytics.
A forward/backward button at the bottom of a post that would lead to the next/previous post would also be great
That's a cool idea! Is your intended use case being able to easily spin up different URLs so that you could share them in different places and see which ones drive the most traffic / subscriptions?
Being able to share it with a single person and know if they actually opened it or not would be another use case.
Cheers and thank you!
Can you elaborate? I know some people were paid big $ up front to make the move, but it didn't seem very secret -- the ones I'm thinking of were pretty open about the deals they'd taken, so presumably Substack wasn't pressuring them to keep quiet. And as far as I know they were paid up front for the first year, before moving to an ordinary revenue split and being free to leave.
What will you do when this happens?
[1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/09/18/telegram-messenger...
The welcome page is my single biggest gripe with Substack. Sending people to the /about or /archive pages directly doesn't help because the moment people click on the logo or title to visit the homepage, the email form is shown again. If Substack is marketing the platform as being designed for "Bloggers" too (https://substack.com/for-bloggers), then you shouldn't treat publications as merely being newsletters with an email form. You acknowledge it yourself in this HN post intro that Substack is much more than a newsletter! And I agree, except it doesn't feel like it.
The new Substack app allows people to read and discover Substacks without being shown the welcome form, it only makes sense to have the Web version behave the same too. While I would understand not changing it by default but why not at least have it as an option for writers? Substack already lets writers toggle a bunch of major and minor settings to tweak their publication, why not this too?
We submitted v1.0.1 the moment that v1.0 was released and shipped it on launch day as soon as it was approved by Apple.
For now it's probably most compelling for folks who already do a lot of reading powered by Substack, but we're interested in adding more support for reading non-Substack things (and we already have some basic support for reading Substack stuff in other RSS readers.)
1. Can you please support signing in to multiple accounts? Ideally, you would merge the subscriptions together into one view, but even if not, easy account switching is good enough.
2. Can you gray out the read posts? The "inbox" doesn't distinguish between read and unread, archiving is the only option. But sometimes I might want to refer back, and don't want to archive it yet. (EDIT: I just found the orange dot, but it's not very visible)
3. When you know that I have read the post via email (from the tracking pixels), can you show them as read in the app?
2. Good feedback re: the orange dot! I'll pass that along to our Designer.
3. This is also a good idea, but unfortunately a little less straightforward to get right 100% of the time as email clients increasingly start to get in the way of tracking pixels visibility.
I've been a subscriber and spend about $2K/yr on Substack subscriptions thanks to a generous Enterprise educational budget/policy (and then cheat/steal all my other media/news content).
This is great news.
Societal pressure on this has been intense, and your team's tweets in support of individual expression have been absolutely landmark tweets, and I am a paying customer because of it
Sincerely, thank you
Do you consider letting users customize other readability-related features, such as column width, line spacing, etc.? Like text size, this is good for both usability and accessibility.
Glad to see Dynamic Type supported in your v1.0!
By then, I had entered a different email address (I wasn't sure if I was incorrectly remembering which address I used), and it created a new account for me with that address. The authentication email for the second address arrived very quickly.
When the email for the first account finally showed up, I tried clicking it so I could log into my previously-existing account. It didn't work because I was already logged in with the new empty account. And when I logged out of the account and tried again, it didn't work because (I think) the link can only be used once.
I've tried entering the correct email address again and am now waiting for the email to arrive. Just some feedback on how this process has worked for me! The email address that had problems is a yahoo address, and the one that didn't have problems is gmail, in case that matters.
In the iOS app, we don't support in-app-purchases (subscribers can upgrade to paid via email/web) so there's no 30% take from Apple.
One area I'm especially excited about: discovery through the lens of the writers you trust. What are those writers reading themselves? What else are their readers (whose taste you ostensibly share) reading? We have a light version of this already with reader profiles in the app (and on web) - when you subscribe to a publication, you can choose whether to display it on your profile. Lots more we could do though.
Or even have an unlimited package.
A few comments;
- The font looks quite small (on iPad). Have you considered adding the ability to change font and size?
- Now that all my subs are in here, I don't really need to bombard my inbox. Is there a way so that I can mute sending to my email inbox?
- I love to read when flying. Will my inbox be downloaded for offline reading?
- The iPad experience is admittedly not as amazing as it could be, and something I'm excited to improve big time down the road. For now, the app should respect your dynamic type settings (in case you have your font set larger at the iOS level)
- Yep, there's a toggle you can access from your Profile Tab > Notifications
- Right now the offline experience is so-so but not perfectly optimized. If you refresh your Inbox right before a flight your recent posts should be cached nicely and readable while offline.
Our next step within the Apple universe will most likely be to build an amazing iPad optimized experience. Right now the app works on iPad, but it's definitely not as great as it could be. A better iPad app would also be a good starting foundation for MacOS (and work on Silicon macs out the gate).
Good thought on subscripts.
I see that you have an Android app, coming soon, so this makes me think that you are using some form of hybrid tech (as opposed to native).
*almost
For adding non-Substack publications into the Substack app via RSS, go to reader.substack.com (make sure you're logged in) and click on "Add RSS feed" in the left sidebar.
Separately there's been some interesting challenges on the client side around caching posts, serving post content offline, and purging spam/copyright infringing content.
Are there any female top brass at Substack?
I’m curious - what are some of your goals with the app in terms of reach, retention, engagement and activation of users?
I’m also wondering - does this new channel set up yourselves (and writers) to be at the whim of Apple?
For example, if the app begins to drive any of the metrics above, and Apple someday comes to see it as untenable, would you be comfortable sacrificing it?
Nonetheless it would be nice to provide a mute/block feature, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. There are a couple of commenters who are rather insufferable, and there's no way to downvote them or put them on ignore. I guess it's a relatively tangential use of substack, which is presented as a blogging platform first and foremost, and it certainly succeeds in that. But a bit of user control over their comment stream would be a nice-to-have.
I am looking for an overlay on your code to enable respondents (think contributors) to find each other within multiple threads , by their pseudonym / "handle" , or pen name if you will , including a by date listing of any contributor , such that search for a contributor will produce all of his / her remarks which I call contributions.
Is anyone there now, to whom I may speak ? time is important.
Your platform and business model superb. That said, if newsletter members do not have to search multiple threads , to find an historical contribution, sub-nets may be formed , to reduce time and increase focus.
My name is Jeffrey Sweet.
Will it be easy to switch between accounts? I have my own / and then I have a company account where I follow the students and leave comments with that. So far, looks like I can only sign-out / and then sign back in.
What if I want to follow that crazy political ranter guy in my email... but I don't want it in my feed in the app? It looks like there isn't a way to filter that besides unsubscribing - which will likely lead me to unsubscribe from people - that I normally wouldn't - to keep the app feed tidy.
What if I want notifications, but only for some of my favorite publications? Looks like it's just over-all so far.
Will I be able to edit a typo of mine / in the app? Doesn't look like it.
Will I have to add this app address to my Vimeo privacy/sharing so that my included videos can be embedded in it?
S the small box of files icon an archive button? As in / "here's your box of old files" - or as in "this will archive some amount of things when you press it." It's archive all. What is this bell - probably notification settings? No. It's "Activity" - of which I have none / and I do not understand. Seems like my inbox is the activity. So, maybe comments on my publication?
Again - already wishing for a filter because my inbox is showing the exact 3 publications I don't want to see on the app and nothing more.
What will pushing the substack icon do. Nothing? Seems like it should take me "home" - to what I would presume to be my inbox. Nope. But there is an icon of an incoming mail office box thing. That's the inbox. OK. Library icon - is not good. Doesn't read as a book at all. (to me) and - my list of publications - is not a "book." So - it's not a great icon to begin with / and it looks like spit pane anyway.
Still searching for a way to flip between my own accounts.
But overall - on part with Substack - and a positive move forward. However, I would have preferred to have a better signup module that we could style to match our sites / and other added features / over an iOS app.
What would be your advice to new platforms that want to take a free speech approach, while attracting users across the entire political spectrum? (to avoid the fate of Parlor and Rumble)
In the beginning, I posted blogs on Medium, and I sent out newsletters on Substack.
Then Medium started to provide email subscriptions.
Now Substack has a mobile app.
I need to rethink my content strategy going forward...
edit: I think this is a very reasonable question to ask. I'm sorry it's making some uncomfortable but that discomfort really doesn't change the economic realities of competitive space in the industry.
Context: I'm a happy user of NewsBlur and find being able to go back and forth between Android, iOS, and desktop to be quite useful.
I am an iOS developer, would love to work on it. Do you have any openings on the team?
The hope is of course, that we have an unskewed distribution of voices, however, our increasing challenges with misinformation or maybe rather information warfare show that this _might_ not be the case.
In the old media world, this was to a degree ameliorated by a powerful elite of editors and publishers who controlled and cut off the extremes (bad for business if you have no targeting).
What does Substack think about missing editorial oversight?
If liberalism means anything, it's the ability of the individual to speak truth even when the mob or the government demands that they remain silent. Substack is one of the only platforms available that hasn't bent the knee to the hysterical mob, and I can't tell you how grateful I am for your spine.
Regarding the app, it's very welcome. I've been using the Safari bookmark in the meantime, and the app is FAR better -- the ability to interact more smoothly, save position, etc. A couple issues:
1) Unarchiving? I experimented with archiving an article. While I'm able to find it in the archived section, I don't see any option to unarchive it.
2) Themes? My theme is set to dark, which is great, but I also enjoy sepia in daylight. I don't see any option to change the color scheme.
3) Podcasts? Podcasts in Substack sound like a great idea, but I've had nothing but problems trying to add certain podcasts (e.g. Late Republic Nonsense) to my PocketCasts app. The only way seems to be having Substack email me a personalized podcast subscription URL rather than an open feed I can just search for in PocketCasts. Partnering with Callin might be an interesting idea, since they seem to have adopted the "Substack but for podcasts" model -- often even recruiting Substack talent.
4) Discovery? I'm really glad to see a discovery tab, and I'd love to see suggestions ("if you like Glenn Greenwald, you might also like...").
5) Pricing? Substack has a great model of direct payments, with writers I want to read, but it gets steep very quickly. Rather than dropping $100/year each for five different writers I want to follow, could you explore bundling? Superstars like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi will probably want to remain independent, but there are lots of smaller names who might benefit from exposure through bundling several smaller newsletters under a single price; or simply from more flexible pricing entirely. I don't think I've seen a single newsletter that offers an annual subscription for under $50-60.
I have a subscription to Apple News almost exclusively for the WSJ, but they also have a lot of other inferior magazines -- The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc. As dramatically as they've fallen in quality, it's still a compelling bundle for $10/month, with my payments allocated across publications based on the articles I read. Have you considered a similar bundle, or allowing writers to form their own bundles?
6) Saving articles? I can save articles to a bookmark and store them in a bookmark folder, which works fine, but it would be convenient to save my favorite articles in Substack that allows me to revisit them.
7) Improving comments? The comments section isn't bad, but they could also become crucial draws. Reddit and HN are draws generally for the quality of their comment sections. Substack currently has an unusually excellent audience -- generally intelligent people interested in deep dives into controversial subjects in order to find the truth. There must be some way to liberalize and interweave comment sections in order to draw on audience expertise and perspective.
